Utility central baseload plus distributed Solar peak generation - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Utility central baseload plus distributed Solar peak generation Rooftop Solar enhances Utility economics

• Safe, easy, and affordable
• Unstoppable national trend

(42 states ahead of Kansas)

• Real savings for utilities,

municipalities, rural electrics

Distributed rooftop Solar from residential customers

PV’s place on the grid

Good planning requires accurate information

• Utility Myth 1: Solar “contributes nothing”
• Utility Myth 2: Solar customers are “free riders”
• n the grid
• Utility Myth 3: Utility scale arrays are the most

cost-effective

• Fact: Kansas needs baseload wind power and the

distribution system

• Fact: Utilities will remain critical to solar growth

Evergy’s argument

Solar peak doesn’t match residential peak, so “excess solar power is worth only the avg cost of fuel: 3.4 cents/kWh”

Solar “DG customers are not buying enough electricity to pay their full fixed costs and are thus being cross- subsidized by the other residential customers.”

Utility Myth 1: Missing the peak,

residential Solar “contributes nothing”

FACT: A utility feeder & substation serves all customer classes, not just residential

When a family leaves for work or school in the morning, the house may go empty. But the strip mall, neighborhood school, and

• ffice buildings light up.

When the people return home, the offices go dark. Excess power is shared all the time.

Substation Concrete Plant

Example: Medium businesses

Source: Load curve graphs are from “The Impact of Dynamic Pricing on Westar Energy‘, Dr. Ahmad Faruqui,

Smart Grid and Energy Storage Roundtable, Brattle Group, September 18, 2009. Solar profile is superimposed.

Utility Myth 2:

Solar customers are “free riders” on the grid

Like advertising at the Super Bowl, hours of high demand are expensive: Almost 4 times the cost for utilities to generate and distribute as off-peak power

23.4₵/kWh 6.1₵/kWh

89.5₵/kWh 5.6₵/kWh

Critical Peak Periods (CPP) are afternoons of the hottest 15 days of the year

What’s the average Peak kWh worth today?

• My Westar peak price

graphs are from 2009. Fracking has reduced natural-gas prices, but…

• Fuel costs are no longer

key.

• Capital costs of oversizing

the generation, transmission and distribution hardware are the main factor

Generation chases Demand so utilities try to modify customer behavior Time-of-Use pricing (TOU) tries to fairly assign the costs

• f electricity to the hours it is

least and most expensive to generate and distribute.

2018 KCC/Westar Time-of-Use Pilot Rates

Charge Time Cost Customer Charge $18.50 Energy Charge Winter Period - Energy used in the billing months of October through May On-Peak Weekdays 10:00 AM - 8:00 PM 9.5205₵ kWh Off-Peak Weekends, Holidays, All Other Hours 5.8875₵ kWh Summer Period - Energy used in the billing months of June through September On-Peak Weekdays 1:00 PM - 8:00 PM 16.3105₵ kWh Intermediate Peak Weekdays 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM 11.1945₵ kWh Off-Peak Weekends, Holidays, All Other Hours 7.1611₵ kWh Plus all applicable adjustments and surcharges 4.06

Source: Westar 2018 Rate Application

July 15th Sunrise 6:12 Sunset 8:51 16.3₵ kWh 11.2₵ kWh

43₵ kWh?

7.2₵ kWh

Value of Solar generation from the KCC-Westar TOU Pilot Study

63₵ kWh?

If you agree that Time-of-Use Pricing is a benefit to utilities and all ratepayers:

TOU

• You have to make it

convenient to dry clothes by limiting it to practical hours, 1-7 PM

• Continued compliance

requires retraining new customers as they move in and out of a utility’s territory

Solar Peak Generation

• Peak generation is

governed by the sun’s

• path. It generates from

10 AM to sundown, regardless of human behavior.

• Once a system is

installed, it offsets peak load through its entire lifetime of 25 years.

How much would an Evergy customer be worth who reduces their peak consumption by over 80%

• n all the hottest days …for 25 years?

Conclusion: Solar energy is worth far more than 3.4 cents/kWh.

Utility Myth 3: Utility scale arrays are more cost-effective than rooftop Solar

• The sunlight landing on 10 acres near

Hutchinson is the same as that landing on a collection of rooftops with the same total area, spread around Evergy’s territory.

• So the generation profile of a utility-scale

array would fit Evergy’s needs in the same way that rooftop solar does.

…except for Peak Load distribution

Pacific Gas & Electric found that its typical feeder is used over 50% of capacity …only 40% of the time. There is a lot of investment that is not being used.

If much of the peak can be generated where the electricity is being used, what savings might be available for everyone?

Evergy (Westar and Great Plains Energy) owns …about 28,100 miles of distribution lines. Through 2023, Evergy investments in transmission and distribution will be 70% greater than for generation.

Source: Evergy 2019 Investor Presentation

Recent Distribution Studies

USA

A 2018 study of a range of commercial buildings found that a combination

• f site-based solar, and a

storage system of only 20% of the buildings’ demand

Source: Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory

Holland

A 21-40% reduction

• f T&D demand can

bring a 45-72% reduction of distribution hardware costs …to all rate payers.

* Evergy has 32 customers/mile of line Kansas Electric Cooperatives…….3.2/mile

Testing this theory

It would be as simple as allowing a representative number of solar customers to join KCC/Westar TOU Pilot Study Distribution benefits are greater the closer to the end-user the peak is generated & stored

Rooftop solar = maximum benefits Community solar = mixed benefits Utility-scale solar = centralized resource; few benefits

We need to change course,

Survey of Kansas’ renewable resources

2012 was a brutally hot year, at 14 weather stations in the eastern 2/3 of Kansas This is a typical day:

201208030652 120 3 BKN 84 201208030752 140 6 SCT 82 201208030852 80 3 CLR 82 201208030952 *** CLR 81 201208031052 *** CLR 79 201208031152 *** CLR 79 201208031252 *** CLR 82 201208031352 150 7 SCT 84 201208031452 170 6 CLR 85 201208031552 180 5 SCT 84 201208031652 180 5 SCT 88 201208031752 180 7 CLR 90 201208031852 *** CLR 92 201208031952 140 8 CLR 97 201208032052 140 6 CLR 100 201208032152 170 8 CLR 103 201208032252 200 8 CLR 106 201208032352 200 6 CLR 103 201208040052 170 3 CLR 99 201208040152 *** CLR 90

Red: Hours over 100⁰F

(9 PM to Midnight)

Blue: Wind speed during those hours Yellow: Cloud cover during the daylight hours of those days

Yr Mo Day Time Wind Spd Cloud Temp

Evergy Defined Peak Load Kansas State Weather Data

86% of Westar s efined Peak 93.34% Clear Full Sun 4.69% Scattered Clouds 37-50% Cloudy 1.74% Broken Clouds 63 -88% Cloudy 0.2% Overcast 100% Cloudy h l d

Source: Mary Knapp, state climatologist, Kansas State University

Lesson 1: 93% full sun on Critical Peak Days in Kansas

Lessons?

• 2. Utility Wind?
• Large wind farms have

dedicated and trained maintenance crews

• Wind is a central baseload

resource

• We have to connect to it

thru utilities by powerlines

Wind Speed

Wind is not nearly as directly connected to critically hot days as the sun

• is. Home scale

turbines quickly fail for lack of maintenance. Wind is not a distributed resource.

The Earth begins cool in the morning, heats slowly into the afternoon, and holds its heat until after sundown. Denying this lag is as dishonest as denying climate change. So how do we deal with it?

Lesson 3.

Pre-Peak Solar Solar in Excess of Peak Required Storage

We become more valuable customers As we supply our own peaks

Storage in 2019

• In the last decade, automotive Li-ion battery

costs have dropped by a factor of ten.

• But residential storage can be the size of a

refrigerator, be delivered into the garage by forklift, and be relatively crude and cheap.

• Those are only electro chemical storage
• ptions. Thermal could be at the cost of water

and have an infinite lifecycle of heating and chilling.

Solar with Storage

Credit to Matt Lehrman, Rocky Mountain Institute

Load shifting is the market.

Solar families relieve utilities of a burden

• If you were trying to

improve the bottom line of a company, you would sell off the least profitable portion of the business.

• In a utility business,

that’s peakload generation and delivery.

• The investors most

capable of reducing distribution costs are the solar families along the line…with Net metering we’ve shown there is

• almost no risk or out-of-

pocket expense to the utility or other ratepayers.

Utilities also have a crucial role

• Utilities know their

territory, which areas are growing and which lines have the capacity to carry that growth. They hold the information that would lead to “solar hosting capacity” for each substation or feeder.

• Utilities have access to

low cost financing through government and third-party sources for the T&D system and central baseload wind farms.

• Utilities subcontract

many services, from line construction to tree

• service. They can give

incentives to customers along line replacements and contract the aggregated customers for better prices from solar installers.

• Installers can do the

work cheaper because materials delivery and labor can be contracted in larger blocks.

PV’s place on the grid

Good planning requires accurate information

• Reality 1: Rooftop Solar benefits all customer classes
• Reality 2: Solar customers provide high value kWh
• Reality 3: Rooftop arrays can save utilities a very

large amount in distribution costs

• Fact: Kansas needs baseload wind power and the

distribution system

• Fact: Utilities will remain critical to solar growth

“Us v. them" attitudes are NOT productive. Let's figure out how to work together for our common good.

www.fhreec.org

Peak Demand without Solar Peak Demand with Solar

Demand with & without Solar, relative to System Avg

July 15th Sunrise 6:12 Sunset 8:51

“Ca “Caveman Da Days” o ” of PV

PV got its start competing, not against other generation technologies, but against the distribution system. When we forget that fact, we discount solar power’s unique advantage of not having to be delivered.

Rooftop Solar benefits Utility economics (it’s not about “us v. them”) Utility baseload + distributed Solar”

Reality:

We should be using the system curve, instead of the residential load curve for judging the effect

• f Distributed Solar Generation
• n the system.

(it’s not about “us v. them”)